Richard Harrington

“The prevalence of pentagons in nature is no mystery-it is inevitable in a random aggregate of undifferentiated cells of any kind, for it is simply a result of unidirectional contiguity and economy of interface.” Cyril Stanley Smith from a forward to Arthur Loeb’s Space Structures Their Harmony and Counterpoint. As always someone has said it more clearly than me. For more than a decade most of the objects I’ve been building have a dodecahedron or an icosahedron as their seed. The proto spherical result is fulfilling because of the sense of completeness achieved by taking one more step beyond the cube so very precisely conceived in the Euler Schlaefli Equation V-E+F-C=0.

180 sided polyhedron dodecaheral seed.

105 x 105 x 105 cm

Folded hardware cloth

2010

The sixty interlocking tetrahedra observe the rules of the Euler Equation: V-E+F-C=0. It was designed so that a viewer could alternately look at or through the object, and that the object must be more than a simple display of vertices and edges. The sculpture observes the condition of origami that all its tetrahedral edges are convex. To achieve a maximum amount of moiré patterns, the layers of material must be parallel or nearly parallel to each other. The spherical property achieved by employing a dodecahedral seed is, for me, a fulfilling essential property like no other.